The Road

J. Paul Higgins Review

I read Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)'s novel The Road this past summer. A post-apocalyptic story about a father and son trudging through a world of no animals or birds, dying trees and constant fires, it's prose was sparse and elegant. However, it was also unremittingly bleak. There was little sense of hope and no sense that anyone would survive the planet's decline. Many of the remaining humans resorted to cannibalism or suicide.

So when I heard that The Road was to be made into a film I was intrigued. Would the director be tempted to brighten up the plot in order to attract an audience, would he highlight the gruesome episodes and make it into a horror flick or would he be true to the book but settle for a limited, art house audience? In the event he seems to have worked some cinematic magic, remaining true to the book but still somehow imbuing the film with a more hope than I found in the novel.

I'm still not sure how this was done. I suspect that it has something to do with the superb acting, especially by the young Kodi Smit-McPhee who plays the boy. Other principal roles are played by Viggo Mortensen (Eastern Promises, A History of Violence and Aragon in the Lord of the Rings) and Charlize Theron (Monster, In the Valley of Eliah) who's character is only seen in flashbacks. Tellingly a number of small but important roles with very little screen time (each less than 10 minutes) attracted top flight actors such as Robert Duvall and Molly Parker.

Not a good first date movie. But for those interested in exploring courage in the face of despair and hope in the face of inevitable destruction, or for all film goers interested in strong acting, definitely worth a look.

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And here's Robert Foster's take:

WARNING: anyone with a queasy stomach or who is otherwise put off by blood, violence, cannibalistic allusions (one character is called “Baby Eater” in credits), corpses, abused trees, dark gray smoke-filled skies with zero sunshine should probably (ok… definitely) skip this offering cause a Bob Hope road flick it isn`t...

HOWEVER... if you are willing to work through the above to see how much love a father can have for an angelic son who in turn embodies a trusting innocence to get to some semblance of the possibility of hope in a hopeless situation -- by all means see this star-filled (though barely recognizable under layers of crud) movie.

A father (Viggo Mortensen) and 10-year-old son (played exceptionally by Kodi Smit-McPhee real life son of Australian actor Andy McPhee ) are two of the last nameless humans left on an Earth that has undergone some kind of apocalypse whereby food, wildlife, plants, bugs, game shows, etc., are all gone. The son has only ever known this.

They have adventures or better yet near misses with the final oblivion along with a couple bits of luck in their quest to just stay alive and reach the sea for some reason we are never told. Flashbacks to the mother (Charlize Theron who can’t seem to lose her beauty even in a dark setting like this) show how good things used to be before she bails and dies out in the dark - not typical of a mother in my humble opinion but then this is not a typical scenario.

The world is filled for the most part with some pretty desperate folks who are feeling more than a little peckish. There are glimmers of humanity mostly played by big name actors (Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce,
Canadian Molly Parker…) who probably signed on with fresh memories of the last Cormac McCarthy book put to film that rightly won big time Oscars: No Country for Old Men. The real evil or victimized characters
are played by, as far as I can tell, yet-to-be-discovered thespians.

In the final analysis, can catastrophy lead to good things via bad things? We hope so. I guess anyone who has a child and/or a parent will probably love this movie at some level; the problem is getting to that level.

PS: Oh, for those do-it-yourself handymen out there, keep an eye out for a scene that shows new self healing uses for staple gun and duct tape (sorry but I had to chuckle with visions of Red Green trying to do something similar Monty-Python-style on his old CBC duct-tape-theme television show). Ewww, see how this film made me look desperately for some kind of humour?

Catharsis anyone? Ah, I feel much better now.

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